It comprises a silicon waveguide fused to an active, light-emitting, III-V epitaxial semiconductor wafer.
[1][2] The silicon laser is fabricated by a technique called plasma assisted wafer bonding.
Silicon photonics uses these same electronic manufacturing technologies to make low-cost integrated optical devices.
Potential uses cited in the references below include fabricating many, possibly hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers on a die and using silicon photonics to combine them together to form high bandwidth optical links for personal computers, servers or back planes.
These lasers are now fabricated on 300 mm silicon wafers in CMOS foundries in volumes of over one million per year.